week 17: Hannah Pulley

Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on, le malheur est qu'il tue ses élèves. 

Maybe you understood that. Maybe you would have used a translator, either a person or the person who codes the computer which does the translating. It would have been someone skilled in another language, as well as your own. But then again, language is nuanced and complex, heavy with interpretation made by the speaker and listeners, influenced by the viewpoint of the translator. If what you needed was the clearest and most authentic experience, few things surpass the understanding that comes from knowing the language yourself. The benefits that come from knowing a foreign language are enticing, but the current and future need for communication and cultural understanding makes it imperative that we place more emphasis and allow more resources for foreign language instruction in our schools and universities.

One of the most direct benefits of language learning is the cognitive strengthening it provides. in Brian T. Gold’s (et al.) study on the cognitive control of monolingual and bilingual people, it was shown that children brought up speaking two languages and continue to do so on a regular basis are better at multitasking and have a greater capacity for working memory. These improvements would help students in school and in their daily lives. According to Spring Magazine, a foreign language highlights the differences between that and your native language, improving your understanding of structure and grammar. If you consider this fact, it becomes clear why romance languages such as Spanish, French and Italian are relatively easy to acquire once you know one, and also why Frisian and Dutch are considered easy languages for English speakers because of their shared West Germanic roots. By having the opportunity to compare linguistic structures, build vocabulary, and learn to switch between tasks, students in our country would gain greatly from learning and using a foreign language, both in the classroom and in the real world.

Despite the benefits, many myths still persist. Little to no evidence exists that multilingual students have smaller vocabularies or that they are slower to process and respond in conversation. Parents who raise their children speaking two or more languages, or start them in an immersion program at an early age will often be cautioned of the effects on the child's skills in English or another primary language, but research shows more benefit than harm. It is true that the financial costs of such programs are greater than those for subject education in English because of the expense of training teachers and purchasing extra materials. According to a recent NPR report, English teachers in the French speaking country of Monaco undergo some of the most rigorous training in the world, including at least one year of immersion. It should also be noted that Monaco’s foreign language program is one of the most successful in the world. These costs, however, are all necessary when considering the impact that the students of today will have on the future.

…The future, which poses one of the most important questions of all, the question of global relations and interaction. It has long been said that we live in a global society, which is a vast network of connections: the physical, between people; the electronic, between computers; and the social, between cultures, this network which grows and twists every hour of every day. By using the term ‘global society,’ it is implied that the physical barriers of distance between nations has been breached, and what remains is the efforts that we must take to understand each other more fully.  Every country is tasked with educating the thinkers and communicators of the future, yet foreign language skills in America and English speaking countries are among the poorest in the world. According to an article published by the Center for Applied Linguistics, students in many parts of Europe and Asia begin learning their second language by the end of primary school, while American students do not learn another language in school until the average age of fourteen. While the level of concern is still low, news, communication and international relations require greater numbers of people who can speak many languages. Meanwhile, a decreasing emphasis on learning a foreign language to proficiency means less of a demand for professors at universities, and overall, fewer people learning a smaller variety of languages. English’s current dominance over communication and media means that we are still getting by, but where would it leave us if the power balance were to shift, as it already seems to be doing?

As a final example, I leave you with this: the space race sparked after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I led to an increasing emphasis not only on science but foreign language as well in schools. The realization that science was important led to people across the world having the means to collaborate and discover, making technological leaps that we still benefit from today. In the same way developing a focus on teaching foreign language in schools so people can use it in their lives means that the United States and English speaking world becomes a part of a more connected, understanding, and harmonious planet.